How did Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening end in the revival of totalitarian rule – with Prof. Pei Minxin

The transformative socioeconomic changes China has experienced since Deng Xiaoping launched “reform and opening” in 1979 have turned an impoverished society into a global superpower.  But instead of a freer and more open society fully integrated into the existing liberal international order, economic modernization under one-party rule has only revived totalitarian rule and triggered an escalating geopolitical conflict with the U.S.   Although this tragic and potentially catastrophic outcome is not inevitable, Deng’s strategy to save the Chinese Communist Party with capitalist tools made the return of strongman rule under Xi Jinping and reversal of reform an accident waiting to happen.

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Minxin Pei is the Tom and Margot Pritzker ‘72 Professor of Government and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College.   In 2019 he was the inaugural Library of Congress Chair on U.S.-China Relations.  Prior to joining Claremont McKenna College in 2009, he was a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and served as its director of the China Program from 2003 to 2008. He was an opinion columnist for Bloomberg (2023-2024) and the author of From Reform to Revolution: The Demise of Communism in China and the Soviet Union (1994); China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy (2006); China’s Crony Capitalism: The Dynamics of Regime Decay (2016); The Sentinel State: Surveillance and the Survival of Dictatorship in China (2024); and The Broken China Dream: How Reform Revived Totalitarianism (2025).

Minxin received his Ph.D. in government at Harvard and taught at Princeton University (1992-1997).  He is the recipient of the National Fellowship at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and the Robert McNamara Fellowship of the World Bank.  His op-eds and columns have appeared in the New York Times, the WSJ, the Washington Post, FT, Nikkei Asian Review, Project Syndicate, the Economist, Bloomberg, and other publications.
This event is hosted by the China and the World Program and co-sponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute (WEAI) and the The Institute of Global Politics (IGP)

Registration and Attendance:

If you have pre-approved access to the Columbia campus, please go to: School of International and Public Affairs, 420 West 118th Street, Room 918, New York, NY 10027

To attend this event online, please register HERE.